West Nile - the smoking (immigrant) gun?

"The first evidence of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, which killed seven people in New York in 1999, has been discovered in Massachusetts in the body of a dead crow, state public health officials said Wednesday." - Tim McLaughlin, Reuters, July 26, 2000.

The Eastern Seaboard has been watching the spread of this disease with horror - which, given the geographical predilections of the national mass media, means that the whole country has been watching it too. But despite the massive coverage, no-one has asked the obvious question until this mention, buried in the last paragraph of McLaughlin's story:

"U.S. health authorities do not know how the virus was introduced into the United States, but it may have come from an infected bird that was imported or an infected human from a country in Africa, southwestern Asia or the Middle East."

Italics emphatically added. Contagious disease was one of the reasons the authorities at Ellis Island consistently turned back about two or three percent of the inflow during the last Great Wave of immigration in 1890-1920. (The other main reason: the would-be immigrant might possibly become a public charge ... laugh laugh.) Matt Maggio at the estimable Alamance Independent has chronicled several examples of diseases imported by this new Great Wave http://www.alamanceind.com/newfol~4/immig.html.

We are scrupulously fair at VDARE. The disease could have been caused by the brutal import traffic in pets. But the question should still have been asked...